Make Money Recycling Cars, Computers and Paper - Autos - Cars
Article about car salvage yards with some stories about the early days of recycling and in particular the recycling of computer paper and computer hardware spare parts back in the 1970's.
There is money to be made out of waste and the added attraction is that it is almost always a worthwhile and environmentally useful exercise.
The old rag and bone man with his horse and cart shuffling around towns and cities in the U.K. is rarely seen today but how amused some of these long dead characters would be to know that their simple trade is now called recycling and is considered green and commendable.
The rag and bone man was doing it in the hope of making a modest profit and enough sometimes just to feed himself and his horse.
The cart and horse has been replaced by smart vans with specialist materials collection from good clean clothes, used ink cartridges and catalytic converters.
Paper recycling was one of the first of these enterprises and 30 or 40 years ago when there was no such thing as a personal computer or a VDU every management report had to be printed on reams of music rule continuous stationery.
Typical boxes of paper were 2,000 pages long and often double or tripled carbonate papered. In a modest sized company of a few thousand employees it was not uncommon for band and later, laser printers to produce half a ton a day of reports.
Working in one computer room back in the late 70's some of us realised that the paper salesman was offering deals for new paper to get his sales figures up at such fantastically cheap prices that we could make money ordering twice as much as we really needed and then flogging this unused paper back to the paper recycling man who was paying more than we paid for new!
This was the moment I fell in love with recycling and decided to research further.
In those days company waste was extraordinary and one only had to look into the skips at the back of big factories all the way down to tiny industrial units to realise money was being thrown away.
At about the same time a legal landmark meant that the big computer mainframe manufacturers lost the right to force their customers to use only the original manufacturers'engineers and parts for maintenance.
As a result hundreds of engineers left and set up their own third party maintenance companies and the one thing they were short of were spare parts.
Many original manufacturers some of which are still household names were so dumb they continued to throw into their skips all their original parts which were then collected often at no charge by computer scrap merchants.
Some of these men became millionaires overnight as people like I would scour their yards looking to fill the shopping list of spare parts from the new third party maintenance companies.
Recycling is profitable and enjoyable. It works just as well with car salvage yards as it used to with mainframe computer graveyards.
It is only in recent years with rocketing metal prices and enterprising recyclers that scrap dealers have learnt the need to think the word recycle as much as just crushing blindly everything that arrives at the yard.